Struggling to find a flight? You're not flying solo

“A decade of restructuring in the U.S. airline industry has produced a sharp reduction in air service that is curtailing traveler choice and some local economies even as it improves the industry's health, new research shows,” according to this story from The Wall Street Journal.

“Among the hardest hit were the nation's 35 midsize airports, as defined by the government, where carriers cut 26% of their scheduled flights in the five-year period,” according to the story. “The cuts affected airports such as Palm Beach, Fla., Cleveland, Kansas City, Mo., and Oakland, Calif. Some are offering financial incentives —reduced landing fees, lower gate rentals and revenue guarantees — to attract new flights.”

At Hopkins, for example, there were 79,574 departures in 2012, down 25.8% from 107,290 in 2007. The number of seats was down 23.6%, to 5.66 million in 2012 from 7.4 million in 2007.

Akron-Canton Airport, while considerably smaller than Hopkins, in some respects bucked the national trends. Its number of departures was down just 4%, to 12,426 in 2012 from 12,962 in 2007, but the number of seats rose 15.8% to 1.14 million.

Powering down

Akron-based FirstEnergy Corp. has hired an adviser and “started implementing its plan to sell up to 1,240 megawatts of unregulated non-core hydro generation assets,” Reuters reports.

The utility company did not identify the hydro plants to be sold but wants to complete the sale in the second half of the year, FirstEnergy CEO Anthony Alexander said during the company's first-quarter earnings call.

Mr. Alexander said FirstEnergy plans to use the proceeds of the hydro sale to reduce debt, though he did not estimate how much the hydro plants were worth, according to Reuters.

The news service says FirstEnergy owns several unregulated hydro facilities in Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia, including part of the 3,003-MW Bath County pumped storage plant in Virginia, and the 451-MW Seneca pumped storage plant and 52-MW Lake Lynn hydro plant in Pennsylvania.

One megawatt powers about 1,000 homes, Reuters notes.

FirstEnergy first announced it was looking to sell the competitive hydro plants in February.

In it for the long term

While Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. is about to open its impressive new headquarters, an effort to revive its old space “marks the latest attempt (by developers) to repurpose large corporate headquarters that have grown obsolete,” The Wall Street Journalreports.

Such properties “are sprinkled throughout the country, particularly in the East and Midwest, left behind by companies that have gone out of business, were acquired or moved as they adapted to change,” according to the newspaper.

Stuart Lichter, the developer of Goodyear's new building, “as part of the deal got the company's aging corporate palace, which includes a 1,786-seat theater, a 5,000-seat basketball arena and a 'mahogany row' of wood-framed executive offices,” The Journal says. (The old headquarters is about a half-mile away from the new one.)

Mr. Lichter, president of California-based Industrial Realty Group LLC, is “planning to convert the 1.7 million-square-foot hodgepodge of brick and concrete buildings into hotel rooms, housing, modern office space and other uses,” according to the story. “He is planning to start this summer on a 130-room hotel, about 100 rental apartments, a theater and other work with a total price tag of $148 million.”

However, the paper says it “isn't clear how much demand there would be for his planned 800,000 square feet of office space in the Rust Belt city that has seen its population fall to 198,000 from its peak of 290,000 in 1960.”

Mr. Lichter tells The Journal, "It's going to take us some time. I don't think we're going to fill 800,000 square feet in a year."

We like to watch

Clevelanders like their live TV, but they're also fond of the DVR and TiVo.

That's one takeaway from this USA Today story about a new Nielsen study of media habits in 25 major U.S. cities, including Cleveland.

Among the findings:

Live TV viewing “is most prevalent in Baltimore, Philadelphia and Midwestern cities including Pittsburgh, Detroit, Cleveland and St. Louis, where viewers spent an average of more than 5 hours a day watching live TV according to the study, conducted in February.” But St. Louis residents and Clevelanders “spent the most time watching time-shifted TV, nearly an hour a day.”

San Franciscans were most likely to own iPads and other tablet devices: 36% of homes there did in February, Nielsen says, followed closely by Boston with 35% and Washington, D.C., where one in three residents had one. Use of iPads was lowest in Pittsburgh, St. Louis and Phoenix, where 10% or fewer use them.

Smart phones are most popular in Houston, where 76% of residents ages 13 and older own one, followed by Dallas (73%), Washington and Sacramento (72%), Miami (71%) and Los Angeles and San Francisco (70%).

Video on demand, which enables viewers to time-shift viewing without a DVR, has been slower to catch on, but is most prevalent in Dallas and Detroit, and least so in Charlotte and Los Angeles.

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